"Act your age!" is usually said with a tone of disapproval, whether you are a toddler or well into your senior years. Society has clear expectations for us as far as what is proper behavior at any age, and not conforming is not always regarded kindly. Does it matter? New research suggests that perhaps it does.
Research by Hanna Kuper and Michael Mormot of the
What Kuper and Marmot found was that those people who thought old age began earlier were more likely to have had a heart attack, to be suffering from heart disease or be in poor physical health generally when they were followed up six to nine years later.
The Kuper and Marmot study is not the only research to demonstrate measurable benefits of thinking positively about ageing. Becca Levy from the Yale School of Public Health also produced some extraordinary findings. Her study had followed more than a thousand people who were at least 50 at the time. She found that people who had positive ideas about their own ageing (who agreed with comments such as "I have as much pep as last year" and who disagreed that as you get older you get less useful) lived for an average of 22.6 years after they first participated in the study, while the people who felt less positively about ageing lived for just 15 years more on average.
How can this be? Read this article for answers.
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